Some twenty years ago, customer services were going through the call center revolution. This involved your calls to companies going through to a huge office where hundreds of phone operatives would answer and attend to calls – often in a rather robotic and detached manner. This ended up turning consumers off. But now, we live in the digital world, with far better options for businesses looking to differentiate via their customer services. In this guide, we’ll look at three of the most compelling ways to adjust your customer services in light of recent technological advancements.
Better Calls
It’s highly likely that you’ve been on a frustrating call with a business. This will have involved being put through to a kind of receptionist, before being rerouted three or four times to someone who may be able to deal with your query. At periods you’ll have had to hold the line. Sometimes, your call ends abruptly without you knowing why.
Happily, you needn’t put your customers through this terrible experience anymore. Automating the first part of each call, with options for the user to press numbers based on their query, means that they’re always sent to the right phone operative quickly – leaving no room for delays and frustrations to grow. It’s a savvy way of bringing automation technology into the phone customer service space.
Bots
In the digital space, bots perform the same function. They mean that you won’t have to have a small army of people on their computers waiting for any message to come through on your social media channels or on your website – you can automate answers to many of the most common queries that you receive. This helps you shed unneeded staff while getting to the bottom of customer queries faster.
You can set up a bot on your website and on social media. For instance, you can use an Instagram bot to ensure that all messages on that platform are replied to or forwarded to a human who can deal with a specific query. You can tailor these bots so that they either perform a small initial function or take your customers on a longer journey of automated questions and answers to get them the resolution they’re seeking. It’s another excellent way to make customer journeys more enjoyable.
Emails
Many consumers still use email to converse with businesses. They’ll do it when they’re seeking a refund, enquiring about where their package might be, or when they just have a simple question about your returns policy. These emails can come in by the shedload – quickly overwhelming the individuals you’ve asked to keep an eye on your inbox.
Here, again, automation is at hand to save you time, money and energy. You can automate emails to those expecting deliveries, giving them an estimated time of arrival. You can automate emails based on someone’s browsing history on your website. You can even automate emails based on the keywords contained in inbound emails – helping answer queries without requiring a human to get in touch each time you get an email from a customer.
There you have it: three key ways in which customer services are being enhanced by technology in the modern day.